“It is not because we lost the war that we grow decadent. We fall because we are human; it is only because we live that we fall.”
This is perhaps one of the most famous quotes from Sakaguchi Ango’s “Discourse on Decadence.” As someone who experienced both the revolutionary Meiji period and the post-World War II Showa era, Sakaguchi is one of the most interesting writers in postwar Japan. His life, perspective and work all circulate various dramatic dualities in Japan unique to this time: prosperity and oppression, liberalism and imperialism, individuality and national polity.
Why would we, as humans, fall to the ideas of fascism, imperialism and various other extreme ideologies? Why would the Japanese commit atrocities such as the Rape of Nanking? These are questions pondered by countless intellectuals after World War II and, frankly, throughout history. In his work, Sakaguchi pivots away from an economic or social point of view, instead delving deeper into how human nature allows for these dark periods of history. He claims that such atrocities are the result of the improper relationship that humans have with decadence.
Decadence, as defined by Sakaguchi, is not necessarily tied to the typical excess, corruption or degeneration we associate with the word. It is simply embracing human nature in a way that is not yet, and perhaps never will be, justified in a world governed by the moral standards of any given historical moment. Decadence, in this sense, is a complete disregard of these standards.
Why do these moral standards even have to exist in the first place? For Sakaguchi, it is because we are afraid of complete decadence. Because we fear our true selves, we invented the restraining tool of morality. We created political systems driven by invented ideologies, like nationalism and “Gemeinschaft” in Japan, because we fear that complete decadence would bring isolation. Without a collective understanding of morality, we would each be isolated, forced to accept our individuality without guidance or support from one another.
Sakaguchi often uses the analogy of Japanese women mourning for their deceased husbands within a Confucian moral framework to describe the relationship between decadence and the ethical world. Even if their husband is dead, the mourning ritual will still keep women operating within the old family structure — a form of being that people created to ensure stability. Yet, after years and years of mourning, the act of mourning itself will undoubtedly become less ritualized and formal, and thus the women will slowly gain the freedom needed to find a new spouse. It is not because society has changed dramatically, but because the mourner’s emotional state has improved and they have stopped ruminating on their loss — humans are born not to strictly follow these Confucian moral doctrines and rigid principles, but to embrace their flow of emotions.
The same applies for bushido — Japanese soldiers, to perpetuate the samurai spirit, would kill themselves or commit “kamikaze” when they realized a failure on the battlefield was inevitable. But is an act of decadence — the act of not committing suicide after their defeat — truly a decaying act? Will bushido and even the emperor himself — the tools and symbols invented to check and balance the natural tendency of decadence — work all the time?
From Sakaguchi’s perspective, Confucian female ethics, bushido and the emperor are nothing but foam-like projections. They are foam-like because they can never truly restrict humans’ wishes of refusing to commit bushido or remarrying — these acts of “decadence” that violate specific moral ethics. Even if people can stab a virgin to death to save her virginity or institute discipline to force women to stay loyal to their deceased husbands, there will always be soldiers who escaped from kamikaze and women getting remarried. Even though the moral standards of our world have a strong hold on our behavior, eventually, as in each of these scenarios, decadence will resurface, and our underlying individuality can push us to break free from blindly following those standards.
But all of these structures still exist because humans are too cowardly to embrace complete moral decadence. These systems are also so entrenched in society that it is almost impossible to exist outside of them. We think repeatedly of our future, love and shame whenever we make decisions because we are socialized to be moral beings. We either follow old, traditional ideologies or invent a new one — bushido for the Warring States period and Japanism, national polity and East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in the Showa era — to attain salvation through a universally agreed ideology or politics. But can we, after being completely molded and shaped by such a contrived system, still be considered human, with a humane soul? Can those people who blindly surrender themselves to the immense, great power of certain moral discipline be considered to live in their individuality and unique history?
Thus, Sakaguchi wrote that “perhaps the emperor too is no more than an illusion, and the emperor’s true history begins from the point where he becomes an ordinary human.” Only when the emperor retreats from his responsibility as a symbol of moral order and an ultimate representation of divinity can he become a human with humanity. This newfound decadence allows the emperor to understand, for example, systematic oppression in the Japanese political hierarchy as oppression rather than a success in defining Japanese national polity. Through the decadence of isolation, through thinking outside of the moral constraints our societies enforce on us, he is able to see that these are only systems, not objective truths. It is only when we decide to face our nature and embrace our decadence — our will to pursue our individuality and desires that might seem incompatible with a moral order — that we can truly become humans.
Leslie Tong PO ’29 is from California. She loves films, history and literature. She is currently trying her best to get a driver’s license ASAP.